Interfaces 

About: Interfaces is an academic journal published by Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Decision support system & Supply chain. It has an ISSN identifier of 0092-2102. Over the lifetime, 2809 publications have been published receiving 79669 citations.

How to Make a Decision: The Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract: People make three general types of judgments to express importance, preference, or likelihood and use them to choose the best among alternatives in the presence of environmental, social, political, and other influences. They base these judgments on knowledge in memory or from analyzing benefits, costs, and risks. From past knowledge, we sometimes can develop standards of excellence and poorness and use them to rate the alternatives one at a time. This is useful in such repetitive situations as student admissions and salary raises that must conform with established norms. Without norms one compares alternatives instead of rating them. Comparisons must fall in an admissible range of consistency. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) includes both the rating and comparison methods. Rationality requires developing a reliable hierarchic structure or feedback network that includes criteria of various types of influence, stakeholders, and decision alternatives to determine the best choice.

Organization Design: An Information Processing View

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explain why task uncertainty is related to organizational form. In so doing the cognitive limits theory of Herbert Simon was the guiding influence. As the consequences of cognitive limits were traced through the framework various organization design strategies were articulated. The framework provides a basis for integrating organizational interventions, such as information systems and group problem solving, which have been treated separately before.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process—A Survey of the Method and its Applications

Abstract: This paper briefly reviews the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and its applications in diverse decision problems. It addresses some of the major extensions and criticisms of the method, as well.

Tabu Search: A Tutorial

Abstract: Tabu search is a “higher level” heuristic procedure for solving optimization problems, designed to guide other methods (or their component processes) to escape the trap of local optimality. Tabu search has obtained optimal and near optimal solutions to a wide variety of classical and practical problems in applications ranging from scheduling to telecommunications and from character recognition to neural networks. It uses flexible structures memory (to permit search information to be exploited more thoroughly than by rigid memory systems or memoryless systems), conditions for strategically constraining and freeing the search process (embodied in tabu restrictions and aspiration criteria), and memory functions of varying time spans for intensifying and diversifying the search (reinforcing attributes historically found good and driving the search into new regions). Tabu search can be integrated with branch-and-bound and cutting plane procedures, and it has the ability to start with a simple implementation th...

Thirty Years of Conjoint Analysis: Reflections and Prospects

Abstract: Conjoint analysis is marketers' favorite methodology for finding out how buyers make trade-offs among competing products and suppliers Conjoint analysts develop and present descriptions of alternative products or services that are prepared from fractional factorial, experimental designs They use various models to infer buyers' part-worths for attribute levels, and enter the part-worths into buyer-choice simulators to predict how buyers will choose among products and services Easy-to-use software has been important for applying these models Thousands of applications of conjoint analysis have been carried out over the past three decades